Descriptions:
Standard Bots cofounder and CEO Evan Beard joined Bloomberg Technology to announce the company’s $200 million Series C raise at a $1 billion valuation, with funds earmarked to expand its 70,000-square-foot Long Island manufacturing facility and accelerate R&D. Beard claims Standard Bots is now America’s largest AI-native industrial robot manufacturer, with machines deployed in aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, and data center applications across all 50 states — 85% of those deployments doing live production work rather than pilots.
A technical differentiator Beard highlights is Standard Bots’ demonstration-based training approach: instead of traditional millimeter-by-millimeter programming, workers use a handheld device to physically show the robot a task once, generating an AI model that handles the variability and edge cases older industrial robots cannot manage. The company positions this as a fundamental shift in what tasks can be economically automated.
Beyond the fundraise, Beard discloses that he is actively advising Congress on legislation to ban Chinese robot manufacturers from the US market on national security grounds, arguing that Chinese manufacturing costs run 5 to 10 times lower than domestic alternatives and that robotics represents foundational infrastructure for restoring American industrial competitiveness. On workforce concerns, Beard frames robots as productivity multipliers that enable workers to produce more, invoking the Milton Friedman “shovels versus spoons” analogy to argue that higher automation ultimately supports higher-paying employment rather than displacing it.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published June 09, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
